A couple of weeks back, I read a post by Graylo where he pondered the vitality of 25 man raiding as part of his “MoP Wishlist” series that he’s been writing. I agreed with a lot of what he had to say in regards to the struggles that 25 man raiders have faced, and I do think that 25s are a dying breed. Throughout the course of this expansion I’ve watched guild after guild close their doors, many of whom I had great respect for and who stood the test of time and survived…until now.

Watching many long-standing, successful guilds shut up shop, and having first hand experience with some of the struggles 25s are faced with, I was already intimately familiar with the challenges that Cataclysm brought to guilds trying to retain a 25 man environment. Graylo, of course, put some numbers to his insights and speculations, but I don’t really think those numbers are needed to show that 25 man raiding is slowly bleeding out.

I think that as long as Blizzard continues to develop content for 25 man raids, those running the progression race will continue to utilize that raid size as their preferred raiding environment – but I can’t help but wonder if by the end of Mists these will be the only people able to sustain 25 man raiding. I also question if Mists will continue to be plagued by the balancing challenges that Cataclysm has seen – which I think has had a significant impact on the survivability of many guilds (even though Graylo disagrees on this point).

I suppose the question to ask, would be if 10s are truly the cause of this, or if game stagnation has a larger impact. If you ask me, I think it’s a combination of both. The fact is that the evolution of 10s caused a lot of over-saturation of the market as far as guilds were concerned. There are now more guilds than there are active raiders to staff them. Recruiting (or the inability to recruit players that meet your needs as a guild) has been one of the top driving factors causing many guilds (of both sizes) to call it quits. However, I don’t really think that you can explore recruitment without asking what is causing the attrition of current members. Occasionally it’s people realizing that their current guild isn’t satisfying their needs and moving on – but a lot of the time it’s players moving on to something completely unrelated to the game.

A lot of folks speculate that the root cause of this is an overall older playerbase. And it does make some sense – the older players become the more likely they are to have other things that occupy their free time; be it families,work or other obligations. And while I do agree with a lot of this, I think there is probably more to it as well. If I look at myself, as an example, I used to play all the time. ALL the time. I did alt runs, I leveled alts, I farmed achievements – I made my own fun in WoW and almost always had something to do. Seven years later, and I log into raid, but often find other things to do with my free time outside of that. Granted, the problems that I’ve had with my hands have dictated that to some extent, but even when my hands are feeling fairly well and I could play I find myself drawn to some non-WoW related activities.

While I’m sure this is healthy for me, I do question what changed in the game that has me looking for other activities when I have extra free time. Is it just because I’ve done it for so long? Or has something fundamental changed in the game that leaves it less appealing to me? It’s a hard question to answer. I have very recently questioned my future with the game and thought through all possibilities – and ultimately I decided I wasn’t ready to give up yet, and would at the very least start Mists. When I ultimately came to this conclusion, I couldn’t really put my finger on the why, just that I knew it wasn’t quite my time yet.

I know, I digress some. But I do think that the exploration of what is pushing people out of the game, and conversely what keeps them playing, is important to any conversation surrounding if WoW is able to sustain anything, including 25 man raiding. Maybe that’s because while I do feel that the accessibility of 10 man raiding has put an irreversible dent in the survivability of 25 man raiding, I do not think that it is solely responsible for the decline. I think there are probably a lot of other factors involved, that is just the easiest one to isolate.

Do I think 25s will continue to be a viable raid option moving forward? No, I really don’t. I think the attrition of guilds from this raid format is going to continue as a result of many of the challenges that 25s are faced with, and I think it is going to come to a point where such a small portion of the playerbase takes part in the activity that it’s just not going to be worth the developer’s time to continue to produce the content. And, honestly, I think the sooner Blizzard comes to this realization the better it is going to be for the game. Don’t get me wrong, I love 25 man raiding and I don’t really want to raid 10s, I just don’t see 25 man raiding as remaining sustainable looking forward. Frankly, I was surprised that it survived into Mists and I’ll be curious to see how many 25 man guilds manage to survive Cataclysm and how many crumble into the mists.

What do you think? Is the decline in 25 man raiding irreversible? What do you think it responsible for the decline? Do you think there is enough interest in the playerbase to sustain the format? Do you think it’s worth Blizzard’s development hours to continue creating the content?

I don’t know that I agree that it’s easier to run multiple 10s than it is 25s. I suspect that there are a different set of problems to running multiple 10 man raids. And at that point, it’s almost like you have sub-guilds within your guild I’d think.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue with loot being shared between the two raid sizes, and I’m not sure that it would be such a huge problem if both raids were tuned fairly evenly, or at least had the perception of being somewhat even. I’m not even sure it would matter so much if Blizzard went back to distinguishing 10s and 25s seperately.

I think most players don’t have a strong feeling about 10 or 25. Some have a preference, but my experience has been it isn’t hard to get people who raid 10s to switch (though it is a little harder to get someone who raids 25s to “drop down” to 10s). Instead, I think it’s the amount of leadership willing to do the hard work of making a 25 work. It’s a lot more coordination effort and as guilds fail, very often they fail into becoming a 10 man and never try to become a 25 again. So I think it’s more about finding people to lead and keep a 25 running than it is players strongly preferring 10s over 25s.

Basically today, 10s come about from two directions: someone deciding “hey I want to make a raiding guild” and building it from scratch (or splitting from another guild), or from a 25 losing players and “dropping down” to 10s. The former case is much less work than making a full 25 and ends up being a stopping point much more often.

For people who say 10s are easier; sure, they are for non-cutting-edge raiding, but on harder progression (US top 100-200 or so), it’s much more difficult to maintain a stable, happy roster, and loot is much more variable and random. Frankly, to the previous poster, if 25 people showing up is a raid, chances are you aren’t really pushing progression raiding — a typical raid has around 30-35 people. A typical progression 10 probably has 12-15, and maybe some alts. Variances in class efficacy, healer/tank needs, etc, hurt a 10 more than a 25.

It’s all about what the guild and raid leaders are willing to do. If more were willing to run 25-man raiding guilds, we’d have more 25 man raiding.

I don’t know. I think you’d have to explore and answer the question on why more people aren’t willing to run 25 man raiding guilds. There are likely underlying reasons for that, be it that it’s “easier” to herd 10 cats than 25 or what have you – but when push comes to shove there is something that keeps people from wanting to step up and run those 25s and whatever those reasons are likely why we will continue to see the attrition of 25 man guilds. At least in my opinion.

25 man rewards being greater than 10 man rewards was just a crutch keeping 25 mans artificially viable. Far more people enjoy 25 man raiding than there are those willing to put up and do the extra logistical work that it takes to run one, that’s really the bottom line. In a world with dungeon finder, solo leveling, and now raid finder is it any surprise that players are far less tolerant of the work it takes to run a healthy raid? Back when it took this kind of social work to do anything in the game, even leveling a character in pre-wow days then extending that structure to run large raid was not that big of a deal. Today’s MMO is quite a different beast, and many are finding it just not worth the effort when compared to other forms of entertainment available to them.

Perhaps it does boil down to “not enough people wanting to put in the work” from a leadership perspective. I guess for me, I just don’t buy that it’s all about the loot – and maybe that’s because I’ve never raided solely for loot and have always viewed it as a tool to assist progression.

I personally don’t think that the game is in decline. I think that we will see the player base grow again in MoP to maybe even over 12m. I do think that raiders are moving on (or shrinking) because of the sentiment in the first comment.

– Is the decline in 25 man raiding irreversible?
Not if the steam picked up by LFR is made into a training a new group of raiders.

– What do you think it responsible for the decline?
The constant YoYo in difficulty and RNG, not just in encounter design but also loot. I remember the first 25 I saw fall in Cata was due to a boss dropping 3 belts tow consecutive weeks, I think it was in TofW. LFR from day one would have mitigated some of that… or made it worse, hard to tell.

– Do you think there is enough interest in the playerbase to sustain the format?
Our guild would love to do it, but its hard to mesh people into a 25 that are really 2 or 3 10s because of skill level.

– Do you think it’s worth Blizzard’s development hours to continue creating the content?
I don’t think so, specially if the encounters are also going to be enjoyed via the LFR.

I have to disagree that LFR is going to foster a new breed of raiders looking for 25s. In fact, I think in a lot of ways LFR is going to breed a class of raider who have little to no tolerance for wiping and putting effort into a challenging encounter. I think the “LFR” generation is going to look for what whatever is easiest..which very well mean that their raiding is limited to LFR. I don’t mean to insinuate that all of those running LFR are lazy or bad players – because I don’t believe that. I just don’t see players whose first raiding experiences are in LFR to have realistic expectations about what raiding is really about.

After almost five years, my Surreality — a 25-man raiding guild — is about to become a casualty of the evolving end-game. Frankly, I’m too depressed about it to analyze it, beyond saying that I agree: 25-mans aren’t sustainable in the long-term for *most* middle-of-the-road guilds.

Top guilds can continue probably manage it. But as 3x a week, 8/8N, 0/8H guild leader (one who *used* to clear hardmodes back when recruiting wasn’t a constant challenge, just at a more sedate pace), I just don’t have the time or energy for the constant open recruiting cycle that is necessary to slot a 25-man raid these days. I can’t compete with 10-guilds for those mature, “seriously casual,” “gamers with jobs” type of raiders who are our target audience, or LFR for the more casual fill-ins who used to fill in the gaps in our roster. After an expansion of trying and failing and stressing myself sick over it, I’m just done.

I definitely think that 25 man troubles are more pronounced in the “mid-range” guilds. I mean, we are a 6/8 Heroic guild, and I think we fall into that category as well. Outside of the top progression guilds, I suspect that there will be more and more attrition seen in the 25 man format.

I don’t really see where or how *new* 25-man guilds will come from. There is a natural cycle of guilds, some guilds die, and new guilds are created to replace them. It happened in Vanilla and TBC and Wrath. But I just don’t see how new 25-man guilds will be formed in the current environment. That means that, apart from anything else, natural attrition will kill the 25-man guilds.

I think I remember reading that article, and I agree with you. Guilds are attriting out, and there certainly aren’t any guilds replacing those that have ceased to continue. I am just wondering how long it will be before Blizzard intervenes, one way or the other.

It’s actually just as hard to run multiple 10s as it is to run 25s – my guild runs 4, and we have no end of problems with maintaining the specific setup that each team needs to succeed in terms of ensuring that each team has a balanced comp, backup tanks and healers, a good spread of buffs. That said, with 4 teams, we can run two top-tier teams and 2 medium-core teams, meaning that the better players don’t feel like they’re carrying the less experienced ones, which is a big problem that I had with 25 man raiding.

I don’t think that LFR is going to turn non-raiders into raiders though… it doesn’t teach you anything that a raider needs to know.

Agree about LFR.. all it does is give free gear upgrades to people that pvp or are just really bad at playing their character, while those people that already raid and know what they’re doing carry them.

I agree that running multiple 10s is also quite a challenge. And I couldn’t agree more that LFR isn’t going to “train” raiders, and largely doesn’t teach many of the basics of raiding in the current raid environment of WoW.

From my vantage point of a social non-raiding gadfly with no skin in the raiding game, is this really just a 25-man problem? I’m seeing a lot of successful, long-standing guilds either 1) close up shop, 2) switch to a more casual raiding schedule, 3) drop down to 10s (if 25) or LFR pugs (if 10s), or a combination of 2 & 3. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a 10 man or a 25 man – few guilds are making it through Cataclysm intact.

I mean, I can logically see 25 mans bearing the brunt of the attendance boss, but it seems like a lot of the 25 guilds have hit a point and just … stopped. They didn’t downshift to 10s, they threw in the towel altogether. (Juggernaut and Edge come right to mind, but I know there are more.) 10 man guilds seem to have been more flexible with their responses, but maybe that’s just because I know more of them?

The wide variety of responses you’re likely to get on this topic (my own included) will probably show that anecdotes aren’t data. 🙂

I wonder how much of that is true… The difference I see is that losing members as a 10-man guild incurs quite a large penalty as the guild stops being able to raid (without pugging) while for 25-mans it just means they have to go 10-man or 2×10-man with a little penalty (some players might have less fun) – I would guess this makes 10-man guilds fight tooth and nail against this while many of the 25-mans might go 10-man to weather the storm and hope they will be able to reform as 25-man in the future when recruiting gets better again.

It’s definitely becoming a very small, incestuous world in the Top 20 because of the limited pool of players to draw from, such that guild collapses are often met with joy because of the chance they offer to recruit talented people.

I would agree that a lot of guilds have seen some sort of shift/turnover in Cataclysm regardless of size. But for me, and as Vixsin has pointed out above, there have been sizeable casualties in 25 man progression raiding. Maybe they are just more prominent than those happening at the top of 10s, or maybe people are just paying more attention to the 25s? Regardless of the reason, I think it’s fair to say that 25s took a huge hit this expansion – and don’t seem to be recovering.

I think an additional, continued, problem is that when some of those 25s close up shop a lot of talent is lost. I know a lot of people who have just hung up their hat and “retired” when their guild folded rather than continue playing. And while I don’t know if that is good, or bad, or to be expected, I do know that those who played through Vanilla and TBC often have a different set of expectaions and attitude when it comes to raiding than many who came after them. I don’t know if that’s good or bad as a whole – but I do know that there is a much lower tollerence for certain things now than there was previously.

My 25 man guild is holding on by the skin of our teeth. I have a sneaking suspicion though that Pandamonium will see us raiding as a 10s guild. We’re too casual to keep our best players, or to recruit the very best players on the server, so every tier we lag a little more, and our recruits slip a notch in skill. We have too many not so good players for our awesome players to carry the raid. I’m full of gloom tonight because my people can’t seem to execute H Hagara. Knowing that switching to a 10 man would bring us progression kills is oh so tempting some days.

In the end, no, I don’t think 25s are a sustainable format. I think that the next 6-12 months in dragon soul will break most of the remaining 25 man guilds. The stress of trying to recruit for content that is growing stale, and competing against the 10 mans for good raiders, will probably break us and a lot of guilds like us. Honestly, what keeps us together now are strong social ties. Dropping from 25 to 10 would mean benching or losing too many friends.

You definitely see that catch 22 in recruiting with a lot of guilds. And it’s almost impossible to combat, especially in today’s recruiting environment. And it’s tough. I suspect that we will see a number of 25 man guilds become 10 man guilds with Mists.

Is the decline in 25 man raiding irreversible?
Pretty much, yes. 25-man guilds are dying left and right on my realm – if you’re casual, it’s easier to run LFR. The progression guilds are holding on, but one just downgraded to 10s the other day.

What do you think it responsible for the decline?
Well… 25-mans. I think my guild is amazing and a huge exception to the environment I’ve seen in other guilds – no drama. You create drama, you’re invited to leave. Plus the calmest RL in history 😛 But it’s such a huge pain in the ass to keep everything going and for what? Unless you REALLY love that epic feeling (personally, I’ve never felt the epicness), what’s left? Extra loot was an incentive, but with that gone, what’s the point?

Do you think there is enough interest in the playerbase to sustain the format?
I think there is, but limited. We’ll end up seeing 2-3 progression guilds and maybe 2-3 more casual guilds on 25 on each realm. We’ve been getting a lot of x-realmers recently and I think that will keep some of the guilds going. (I’m secretely wishing we’ll drop down to 2 10s… I miss that environment a lot.)

Do you think it’s worth Blizzard’s development hours to continue creating the content?
Yes, 25-mans are still a big part of the raiding environment. As long as some people keep enjoying it, I think it’s worth keeping.

I think 2-3 progression 25s on each realm is optimistic. Up until this final tier in Cataclysm I think we might have been the only guild still running 25s on the server. I know that there are a good number of servers with zero 25 man progression guilds and are all 10s.

I guess for me, I think I’d almost prefer Blizzard to swap to one raid size (whatever it may be) and refocus on making exceptional content for that one raid size. I think it may not be worth the development hours to continue to cater to two sizes, and that we may be receiving worse content because of it.

Sadly I think the decline of 25man guilds is pretty much irreversible. I think one of the major issues as Rohan said is the lack of new 25man guilds. If you go back to the TBC days when the incentive for a guild to grow from a 10man to a 25man was access to the vast majority of the PvE content it was still incredibly difficult for guilds to make the jump many staying stuck in Karazhan for the entire expansion. Nowadays there is no incentive other than personal preference to become a 25man guild and so it is incredibly difficult for leadership to hold itself together long enough to become a stable 25man guild. This also happens in reverse, when a 25man guild gets into trouble it is easier for it to drop to 10man if it doesn’t have enough members for a week. The longer the guild raids as a 10man guild the harder it is for it to return to 25man raiding

In terms of broader issues with WoW I am exactly the same as you Beru I used to play all the time outside of raids whilst now I pretty much only log on for raiding. One of the issues for me is that since the introduction of LFG in wrath the social aspects of particularly larger guilds have declined. I was talking to one of our tanks last night and he admitted that if he needed to do a heroic for valor he was often tempted to queue solo rather than ask if anyone wanted to come in the guild because he got instant queues and generally the loot bag.

We are increasingly incentivised against grouping with people we know in todays WoW. This feels particularly harsh in 25man guilds because it was often in those smaller groups with guildies that you got to know players. Many players are too shy to speak in a 25man raid and in some cases I only discovered that players had a mike when I played with them in 5mans. Unfortunately humans tend to optimise and find the path of least resistance to acheive their objectives. In a raiding guild the objective is the raid so players will choose the route of least resistance in the rest of the game even if it involves losing some social aspects which they later miss.

Another social issue that has happened at least on my server is the decimation of the pugging community. This occurred at the start of cataclysm probably due to a combination of the initial difficulty of tier 11 and more importantly the change in lockout meaning 25man raiders couldn’t pug 10mans and 10man raiders pug 25s. For me at least this has resulted in the number of people I know on the server outside of my guild declining drastically during Cata. I imagine this decline has also made recruitment much harder for more casual guilds as pugs used to be a great place to scout for potential members.

WoW is ultimately a multiplayer game and so removing the neccessity of forming social bonds with players strikes me as a pretty bad thing. It is notable that the only part of WoW I still do actively is the only part that still requires me to form long term social relationships with other people to acheive.

I think I will agree that no new 25 man guilds forming is a huge problem with the continued survivability of that raid format. I also agree that the somewhat sterile, no need to socialize, aspect that is currently present is very detrimental to the game as a whole. What is so unfortunate about that is that there is no reason it has to be that way…it’s just how players choose to interact with each other. Which is absolutely disapointing.

Like the commenter above, I think the shared lockout has really impeded 25 man guilds. The best way to recruit is to pug, and only having the one lockout puts progression at odds with recruiting. Finding good players is tough when advertising in trade is your only option.

This past week my die-hard 25 man guild finally broke down into two 10 man heroic groups. A combination of attendance issues that have plagued us since around Christmas time, a small local recruiting pool, seemingly little interest in transferring to a 1/8HM 25 guild from another realm (really, there isn’t a market for recruits this late in the game for that sort of progression), and general long-time veteran burn out had left our 25 man team with the lowest progression ranking on our server that it has seen since it first started out back in BC.

I’d have to agree with a few of the other commenters about how the shared lockout has severely gimped the ability to feed the culture of 25 man guilds. Combine that with little incentive to “heard the cats” to feed the 25 man culture, since gear and (more or less) difficulty is pretty much identical between the two group sizes, and you have a lethal threat to the 25 man guild way. Not to mention, it seems that the new surplus of 10 man guilds has flooded the recruitment market, leaving very little room for bigger guilds to absorb new recruits. That’s how I’ve been seeing it anyways.

On top of the new lockouts, I think there are *some* players who often are hesitant to jump ship due to the guild perks. While this isn’t always true for everyone, it certainly gives me pause whenever the rare occasion arises to have one of my characters swap guilds.

So we have long-time player burnout, shared lockouts, and potentially guild perks that are all issues that aren’t doing the 25 man raiding culture any favors. Should Blizzard continue to make content for 25 man guilds? I certainly hope they do, for I’d love to someday (preferably early MoP) to see my guild return to the big-group glory of that style of play. There is (at least in my world) just shy of enough interest in doing 25 mans, but unfortunately (again) the recruitment pools seem to be a bit thin due to the over abundance of 10 man guilds that seem to have sprung up over the duration of Cataclysm. We could potentially see some of the “damage* reverse if Blizzard revised the lockout system, but who knows if we’ll see that happen. I suppose we just have to wait and see what happens come Mists of Pandaria.

I do think that guild perks keep people from moving to a new guild. I think that it was somewhat intended to work that way, but I also think that there are some negative effects as a result. I get that it was supposed to build “importance” into being/retaining a guild – but I also think it has kept some folks in unhealthy environments or prevented them from making a move that they may have made otherwise.

A couple of things. Larger raids require bigger guilds thus more effort on the part of the officers. More work means faster burn out on the part of the officers.
More people in a larger guild means more potential for conflict. This is another source of burnout.
Raid finder gives people a chance to experience raiding without dealing with all the hassle of a guild. This reduces the pool of applicants to raiding guilds.
It’s easier to field a 10 man group of really good players than a 25 man group.
Really the only thing that makes 25 man raiding superior is that you have more slack to train people or bring average players along. LFR gives those people another options with far less commitment.

I disagree that 25s allow you more “slack” to train or bring average players. A lot of times there is a more strict requirement out of 25s players than there is of 10s and you don’t always get to make more mistakes. I think that the whole “10s let you ditch the slack” is overstated and not necessarily true.

I’m of the opinion that people will do what’s easy. If someone’s 25 man guild attrites to the point they can’t raid they are more likely to try and stick with the people they know and give 10 man raiding a try. Maybe, as Saz said above, their guild forms two 10 man raids. Fast forward a bit and you now have two 10 man guilds also looking for members and even through their 25 man guild “fell apart” per say, no real talent was released back into the pool to be recruited by other 25 man guilds, and they’ve added two smaller 10 man guilds also looking to recruit talent to continue their new mode of raiding.

This, more than anything, is why I think 25 man raiding is falling into decline and why I think Blizzard should have changed to a single raid size of 15 or 20. It would also saved them the trouble of double developing content and allow them to focus on fun and challenging encounters that everyone would experience the same way.

This has echoes of some of your other posts over the last few months, and the theme that rings familiar in my ears is that of hybridization. I think that a huge part of how Blizz keeps raiders raiding is the loot-carrot. Want loot? Do a 5man. Want better loot? LFR. Want even better yummier loot than that? 10s. Want even more juicier yummier loot? Raid….oh wait. That’s it. The equalization of loot – the hybridization of loot – has really killed the incentive to do 25s. Cata made this even worse because not only did we get equalization of loot, we got equalization of mechanics, more or less. In 25s you have bosses with bigger health pools to account for more raiders, but apart from a very few mechanical subtleties, there’s just not much difference. You get to see the same content and mechanics and get the same loot, so why have the extra burden of the increased organizational difficulties that 25s (not LFR) bring? Blizz needs to give raiders a reason to raid 25s I think.

I think you were on to something when you mentioned an older player base. I am sure a solid base of the raiding community started playing the game in Vanilla or in BC which means that most of that player base is in their late 20s or even early 30s. When you get older your priorities change and I think the kind of guild you look for is different. I know as someone in my late 20s I wouldn’t deal with some of the raiding guilds I was in during Vanilla or BC just from a maturity stand point. Older players are looking for a mature close knit raiding environment. A lot of the time 25 mans guilds are just to big and don’t have as close of a community feel that a smaller guild can provide. You tend to get a lot more clicks in 25man guilds where in 10man guilds you have more of a family feel to it, knowing everyone very closely. Also allows for the more semi-hardcore raiding that so many players are seeking now a days, 2-3 days a week but yet still doing heroics.

At the end of the day I think Blizzard really needs to just move to one raid format if that is 10man 15man or whatever it is. I remember when people freaked out about when 40man raiding went away in BC for 25man guilds and the community did just fine learning to accept 25man raiding. Them focused on one raid size would create much better content as well, to many fights I think suffer in each of the raid sizes because Blizzard has to make sure the fight can reasonable be done in each size or be changes in a certain way to accommodate the smaller or larger raid teams. Hell even zone design would improve since you wouldn’t have to make super large rooms that feel to big in 10man or make rooms that fit 10mans better but feel really small for a 25man guild.

Creative Commons

If you intend to use anything on this website, please have the courtesy to attribute what you share, and offer links back to this site. If you are unsure if you can use the content found here, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. ~Beru